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Viresh Garg

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originally published on Oct 15, 2024
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Optimizing Library Selection and Mitigating Risks

Problem Statement

In today’s fast-paced software development landscape, organizations heavily rely on open-source software (OSS) to accelerate innovation and reduce costs. The most common use cases for OSS are as libraries or as code components, but lately, even large chunks of a platform’s application are made up of OSS. Major technology companies like NetflixMetaGoogle, and Amazon are open-sourcing their frameworks, contributing to projects such as KafkaSparkIstioKubernetes, and many others. These projects have become integral to modern software development and are widely adopted across industries.

The proliferation of these open-source projects has led to rapidly evolving communities. Platforms like GitHub and GitLab serve as central hubs for collaboration, where developers contribute code, perform code reviews, and manage releases. Standards and metrics are being developed to assess the quality and security of these projects.

However, integrating OSS into enterprise environments introduces significant challenges. The openness of OSS development processes can expose organizations to security risks, compliance issues, and technical debt if not properly managed. Selecting the wrong library version or vendor can result in costly migrations and unexpected disruptions.

Current State

The OSS landscape has seen substantial growth and transformation:

  • Corporate Contributions: Tech giants are increasingly releasing their internal tools and frameworks as open source. Projects like Kafka (originally developed at LinkedIn), Spark (from UC Berkeley, widely supported by companies like Databricks), Istio (a collaboration between Google, IBM, and Lyft), and Kubernetes (originated by Google) have become foundational technologies in cloud computing, data processing, and microservices architecture.
  • Community Evolution: Developer communities around these projects are thriving. GitHub and GitLab facilitate collaboration, code sharing, and community-driven development. The number of contributors, frequency of commits, and responsiveness to issues have become key indicators of a project’s vitality and reliability.
  • Standards and Metrics Development: Organizations are establishing standards for code quality, security practices, and contribution guidelines. Metrics and badges (like those from the Linux Foundation’s Core Infrastructure Initiative) help assess the health and maturity of OSS projects.
  • Vendor Involvement: Companies have emerged to provide enterprise-grade support for OSS. They offer premium services like 24×7 support, timely fixes, technical guidance, and managed SaaS solutions. Examples include Red Hat for Linux, Confluent for Kafka, and Databricks for Spark and Unity Catalog. 

What Changed

Several significant changes have shaped the modern OSS landscape:

  • Commercialization of OSS: Vendors are building businesses around open-source projects by providing added value through support services, custom features, and managed deployments. This has made OSS more accessible to enterprises seeking reliability and support without sacrificing the benefits of open-source collaboration.
  • Integration into Products and Services: OSS tools are increasingly embedded into commercial products or used as standalone solutions. Organizations adopt these tools for critical operations, making OSS a fundamental part of their technology stacks.
  • Transparent Development Processes: The community-driven nature of OSS means that code repositories, design discussions, code reviews, testing procedures, and release plans are publicly available. While this transparency fosters innovation and rapid development, it also exposes detailed information that could be exploited by malicious actors.

Current and Emerging Challenges

Despite the benefits, the evolving OSS landscape introduces new challenges:

  • Security Risks from Openness: The availability of source code, test results, and contributor information can be leveraged by malicious entities, including those on the dark web, to identify and exploit vulnerabilities. Attackers can assess the quality of code and contributors to target weaknesses in libraries and tools.
  • Quality Assurance Variability: The decentralized nature of OSS development means that not all projects adhere to the same standards of code quality, testing, and security practices. Assessing the reliability of a library based on contributor activity and review processes becomes complex.
  • Licensing and Compliance Issues: OSS licenses vary widely and can have significant legal implications. Misunderstanding or mismanaging license terms can lead to compliance violations and legal disputes.
  • Vendor Dependency and Support: Relying on third-party vendors for premium support introduces dependencies that need to be managed carefully. Changes in vendor support policies or service quality can impact the stability and security of the integrated OSS.
  • Technical Debt and Maintenance Burden: Integrating OSS without thorough evaluation can lead to increased technical debt. The lack of long-term maintenance plans or insufficient community support can make future updates and scalability challenging.

These challenges highlight the need for an intelligent OSS risk scoring system focusing on operational, security and licensing aspects of the challenges as described below.

Operational Risk

Operational risk pertains to the quality, functionality, supportability, agility, scalability, and longevity of an OSS library or tool.

Challenges:

Quality Assurance Variability: OSS projects often have decentralized development processes, leading to inconsistent quality assurance (QA) cycles.

Community Support: The health of the community (number of contributors, frequency of commits, issue responsiveness) impacts the tool’s sustainability.

Reputation and Reliability: The project’s history and the reputation of its maintainers affect trust in its stability and performance.

Vendor Dependency: Relying on third-party vendors for support can introduce risks if the vendor changes policies or discontinues services.

Scalability and Agility: Not all OSS tools can scale effectively or adapt to evolving business needs.

Security Risk

Security risk involves vulnerabilities, exploits, and the potential impact on the organization if compromised.

Challenges:

  • Known Vulnerabilities: OSS components may have disclosed vulnerabilities (CVEs) that need timely patches.
  • Mean Time to Repair (MTTR): Delays in fixing vulnerabilities increase exposure to attacks.
  • Exploit Likelihood and Blast Radius: The probability of exploitation and the potential impact scope.
  • Dark Web Activity: Malicious actors may target popular OSS projects, with exploits shared on underground forums.

License Risk

License risk relates to compliance with OSS licenses and the legal implications of using certain types of OSS.

Challenges:

  • License Compatibility: Ensuring OSS licenses are compatible with the organization’s usage and distribution models.
  • Copyleft vs. Permissive Licenses: Understanding restrictions imposed by licenses like GPL (copyleft) versus MIT or Apache (permissive).
  • Policy Enforcement: Managing and enforcing policies around acceptable licenses (whitelists/blacklists).
  • Lack of Visibility: Difficulty in tracking and auditing all OSS components and their respective licenses.
  • Assess Security Posture: Evaluate the likelihood of vulnerabilities and the responsiveness of the project to security issues.
  • Evaluate Community Health: Analyze the activity levels, contribution quality, and governance structures of OSS projects.
  • Understand Licensing Implications: Clarify license terms and their impact on the organization’s compliance obligations.
  • Plan for Support and Sustainability: Determine the availability and reliability of vendor support or the need for in-house expertise.

An effective OSS risk scoring tool enables organizations to make informed decisions, mitigating risks before integrating third-party libraries and ensuring a secure, compliant, and maintainable software ecosystem.

Solution

General Recommendations

As a strategic approach, organizations should implement a comprehensive OSS risk management framework addressing all three risk categories.

1. Risk Assessment Framework

  • Standardize Evaluation: Create a consistent methodology for assessing operational, security, and license risks.
  • Utilize Metrics and Tools: Leverage quantitative metrics from repositories and use specialized tools for operations, security and licensing risk

2. Policy Development and Enforcement

  • Define Acceptable Risk Levels: Set thresholds for what is considered acceptable in each risk category.
  • Automate Policy Enforcement: Integrate risk assessments into CI/CD pipelines to enforce policies automatically.
  • AllowList/DenyList: Analyze risk scores and recommendations at the outset to ensure alignment with technical needs and business goals. Integrate into the build process or pre-approve and reject libraries as whitelisted or blacklisted rulesets for correct choices from the start.

3. Vendor and Alternative Selection

  • Evaluate Vendors: When higher support or reliability is needed, consider vendors offering premium support, hosting and/or managed services.
  • Consider Alternatives: If risks are too high, look for alternative OSS projects or commercial software that meets requirements.

4. Risk Remediation Strategies

  • Exception Handling: Establish processes for approving exceptions, including mitigation plans.
  • In-House Expertise: Invest in building internal capabilities to manage and support critical OSS components.
  • Security Controls: Implement additional security measures as compensating controls where necessary.

5. Continuous Monitoring and Review

  • Ongoing Assessment: Regularly reassess OSS components as new risks emerge.
  • Update Policies and Practices: Adapt to changes in the OSS landscape and organizational needs.

Risk Specific Recommendations

Operational Risk

  • Assess Community Metrics: Evaluate contributor activity, commit frequency, and issue resolution rates.
  • Evaluate Vendor Support Options: Consider vendors offering premium support or managed services.
  • Conduct Quality Audits: Review QA practices, testing coverage, and release processes.
  • Plan for Longevity: Assess the project’s roadmap and community engagement to ensure the long term viability for current and emerging needs.

Security Risk

  • Continuous Monitoring: Implement tools to monitor for new CVEs and security advisories related to OSS components.
  • Assess Vulnerability Management Practices: Evaluate the OSS project’s history in addressing security issues promptly.
  • Implement Security Policies: Define acceptable risk levels and enforce security standards in OSS selection.
  • Consider Compensating Controls: Use additional security measures like code reviews, sandboxing, or intrusion detection systems.

License Risk

  • Conduct License Audits: Use tools to identify and catalog licenses of all OSS components.
  • Establish Clear Policies: Define which licenses are acceptable and processes for approving exceptions.
  • Engage Legal Counsel: Consult with legal experts to understand obligations and implications.
  • Educate Teams: Train development and procurement teams on license compliance

OpsMx Capabilities

OpsMx is the only vendor that focuses on all of the 3 risk dimensions to provide risk score insights as well as remediation recommendations. Additionally as OpsMX integrates with customer’s CI/CD and vulnerability scanning tools, it utilizes the risk scores in all aspects of application lifecycle management to recommend and enforce policy violations, exception approvals, audit evidence and vulnerability prioritization thereby covering the end to end closed-loop process for risk assessment, quantification and treatment around OSS libraries. .

The product not only does the on-demand risk calculation during SCA phase of CI processes, but also continuously monitors for the changes in all aspects of the OSS libraries and tools affecting any or all of these risk scores to provide continuous alerts and notifications to the customers to ensure that the risk is continuously reevaluated even after the application releases are successfully deployed in production. The next section describes the attributes of open source that are factored in calculating operational, security and compliance risk scores.

Release 1

OSS Risk Scoring Feature Implement an OSS Risk Scoring tool that analyzes third-party libraries based on key factors, each contributing to the relevant operational, security and licensing risk score

1. Community Support

  • Number of Contributors: More contributors generally reduce risk, indicating active development and maintenance.
  • Frequency of Commits: Regular updates suggest ongoing improvements and quick responses to issues.
  • Issue Responsiveness: A responsive community can address vulnerabilities and bugs promptly.

2. Maintenance Activity

  • Recent Releases and Updates: Libraries with recent activity are likely to be better maintained.
  • Commit History Consistency: Consistent development efforts reduce the risk of unaddressed vulnerabilities.

3. License Compliance

  • License Type: Identifies licensing risks (e.g., GPL vs. MIT vs. Apache) that may impact legal compliance.
  • License Restrictions: Evaluates the implications of license terms on project usage.

4. Historical Vulnerabilities

  • Past Security Issues: Libraries with fewer historical vulnerabilities are considered lower risk.
  • Mean Time to Detect (MTTD) and Mean Time to Resolve (MTTR): Faster detection and resolution times indicate robust security practices.

5. Adoption Metrics

  • Number of Users and Stars: Widely adopted libraries are often more reliable.
  • Number of Forks: Indicates community engagement and potential for collaborative improvements.

Each factor is weighted to calculate the library’s overall risk score, categorized as Critical, High, Medium, or Low. This score helps teams make informed decisions during library selection by highlighting potential risks upfront.

Future Enhancements

Incorporate advanced features to refine the risk score further:

1. Quality Analysis

  • MTTD and MTTR for the functional and security issues
  • Automated Test Cases: Number and coverage of automated tests written for the library
  • Open to Close Ratio: Exit Criteria policies and exit decisions made for the previous releases

2. Darkweb Interest

  • Chatter: Analyzing the chatter and interest in the library on the dark web.
  • Past Activity: Known exploits and their impact for all vulnerabilities in the library

3. Predictive Analytics

  • Vulnerability Forecasting: Predict potential future vulnerabilities based on historical trends and emerging threats.
  • Exploit Likelihood Assessment: Evaluate the probability of vulnerabilities being exploited in the current threat landscape.

4. Vendor Support Assessment

  • Availability of Paid Support: Libraries supported by vendors may offer quicker fixes and better reliability.
  • Number of Supporting Vendors: Multiple vendors can indicate broader support and stability.

5. Risk Treatment Recommendations

  • Alternative Libraries: Suggest more secure or better-supported options when high risks are identified.
  • Partnership Opportunities: Recommend collaborating with vendors or communities to mitigate risks.
  • In-House Expertise Development: Encourage building internal capabilities to manage and maintain critical libraries.

These factors will further refine the risk score, enabling teams to proactively develop risk treatment plans and make strategic decisions aligned with business objectives.

Recommendations for Customers

To maximize the benefits of the OpsMx OSS Risk Scoring tool and effectively mitigate risks associated with open-source libraries, customers are encouraged to automate the following actions utilizing OpsMx risk management capabilities:

1. Integrate Risk Scoring Early in the Development Process

  • Library Selection: Utilize the OSS Risk Score during the initial stages of library selection to make informed decisions that align with both technical requirements and business objectives. Integrate into the build process or pre-approve and reject libraries as whitelisted or blacklisted rulesets for correct choices from the start.
  • Policy Enforcement: Establish internal policies that mandate the assessment of OSS Risk Scores before incorporating new libraries into projects.

2. Develop a Comprehensive Risk Treatment Plan

  • Prioritize High-Risk Libraries: For libraries categorized as Critical or High risk, consider seeking alternatives or implementing additional security measures.
  • Mitigation Strategies: If high-risk libraries are necessary, develop strategies such as:
  • Securing Vendor Support: Engaging with vendors offering paid support to ensure timely updates and patches.
  • Building In-House Expertise: Investing in training to manage and maintain the library internally.
  • Implementing Compensating Controls: Applying additional security measures like code reviews, sandboxing, or enhanced monitoring.

3. Leverage Alternative Libraries and Solutions

  • Evaluate Alternatives: Use the tool’s recommendations to identify more secure or better-supported libraries that fulfill the same functionality.
  • Assess Compatibility: Ensure alternative libraries are compatible with existing systems and meet project requirements.

4. Establish Vendor and Community Partnerships

  • Collaborate with Vendors: Engage with vendors or third-party providers for support, custom development, or security enhancements.
  • Contribute to the Community: Participate in open-source community-driven initiatives to influence the development and security posture of critical libraries.

5. Invest in Training and In-House Expertise

  • Skill Development: Provide training for your development and security teams on managing and securing open-source libraries.
  • Knowledge Sharing: Encourage internal knowledge sharing to keep teams updated on best practices and emerging risks.

6. Implement Continuous Monitoring and Updates

  • Regular Reviews: Periodically reassess the OSS Risk Scores for integrated libraries to identify any changes in risk levels.
  • Automated Updates: Utilize automated tools to keep libraries up-to-date with the latest security patches and versions.

7. Plan for Contingencies and Future Risks

  • Backup Plans: Develop contingency plans in case a library becomes unsupported or if new vulnerabilities emerge.
  • Future-Proofing: Anticipate potential vulnerabilities using predictive analytics and prepare appropriate responses in advance.

8. Align Library Choices with Business Objectives

  • Risk Appetite Alignment: Adjust library selection based on your organization’s tolerance for risk, considering factors like potential impact and likelihood of vulnerabilities.
  • Strategic Decision-Making: Incorporate OSS Risk Scores into strategic planning to balance innovation with security and compliance needs.

9. Enhance Governance and Compliance Efforts

  • Establish Governance Policies: Create or update policies to include OSS Risk Scoring in the approval process for new libraries.
  • Compliance Checks: Use risk assessments to ensure all open-source usage complies with licensing requirements and regulatory standards.

10. Foster Cross-Functional Collaboration

  • Team Integration: Promote collaboration between development, security, and operations teams to ensure a unified approach to managing OSS risks.
  • Stakeholder Communication: Regularly communicate risks and mitigation strategies to stakeholders for transparency and informed decision-making.

11. Utilize Predictive Insights for Proactive Management

  • Stay Informed: Keep abreast of emerging threats and vulnerability forecasts provided by the tool.
  • Proactive Measures: Implement security measures and updates proactively based on predicted risks.

12. Document and Review Risk Decisions

  • Record-Keeping: Maintain documentation of risk assessments, decisions made, and actions taken for accountability and future reference.
  • Periodic Reviews: Regularly review and update risk treatment plans to reflect changes in the threat landscape or business priorities.

Impact

By effectively utilizing the OSS Risk Scoring feature, organizations can:

  • Make Informed Decisions: Select libraries that meet technical and business requirements while minimizing risks.
  • Reduce Long-Term Costs: Avoid expensive migrations and technical debt by choosing reliable libraries from the start.
  • Enhance Security and Compliance: Proactively address potential vulnerabilities and licensing issues.
  • Improve Project Outcomes: Ensure smoother development cycles and reliable deployments.
  • Enable Strategic Planning: Anticipate future challenges and prepare appropriate risk treatment plans.

Conclusion

Selecting the right open-source libraries is critical to the success of software projects. The OSS Risk Scoring feature empowers organizations to proactively assess and manage risks associated with third-party libraries. By integrating this tool into the development process, teams can make smarter decisions, mitigate potential issues before they arise, and focus on delivering value to the business without unexpected disruptions.

About OpsMx

OpsMx is committed to helping enterprises globally with application security posture management, software supply chain security, and Intelligent, Secure Continuous Delivery. Our solutions provide comprehensive visibility, automation, and continuous monitoring, empowering organizations to build and maintain secure, resilient software systems.

OpsMx Secure CD is the industry’s first CI/CD solution designed for software supply chain security. With built-in compliance controls, automated security assessment, and policy enforcement, OpsMx Secure CD can help you deliver software quickly without sacrificing security.

OpsMx Delivery Shield adds application security posture management, unified visibility, compliance automation, and security policy enforcement to your existing application lifecycle. 

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